Amnesty International warned in its annual report Monday that human rights around the world are under severe attack, creating “a global environment where primitive ferocity could flourish.”

In the report, entitled “The State of the World’s Human Rights,” Amnesty noted that in 2025, authoritarian practices intensified worldwide. Anti-rights rhetoric and discrimination against disadvantaged groups continue to be on the rise.

The report noted that some of the preventative measures put in place to reduce, prevent, and protect against human rights violations have been taken away from the international order, allowing the violations and injustices to continue.

One firebreak after another was breached: through complicity in, or silence about, the commissions of genocide and crimes against humanity; and through imposition of crippling sanctions against those working to deliver justice. That’s how 2025 will be remembered: for its bullies and predators; for the pouring of the politics of appeasement onto burning betrayals of international obligations; for self-defeatism; for states playing with a fire that threatens now to burn us all and scorch the future too, for generations to come.

“Yet rather than confront the predators, in 2025 most governments opted for appeasement, including most European states. Some sought even to imitate the predator. Others ducked for cover under their shadow. A mere handful chose to stand up to them,” the report added.

Those who believe there was little left to undermine in 2025 would be wrong, the report suggests, and that narrative would undermine and distort the history of the post-World War II order.

They erase the masterful work of generations of diplomats and civil society activists the world over, who, often against the wishes of far more powerful actors, helped imagine, shape, and advocate for that rule-based order, and never gave up demanding that the order live up to its stated purpose.

That influential work helped to create the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Genocide Convention, among other international laws.

The report was wary of a potential new world order attempting to undermine international law and the international rules-based system, after attacks against the International Criminal Court (ICC), withdrawal from international conventions, and abandonment of UN agencies.

“Having paralysed [sic] the UN Security Council through unconscionable abuse of their veto powers, the predators now assert that peace and security mechanisms don’t work and seek to replace them with self-serving alternatives,” the report read. “This predatory alternative world order silences dissent and suppresses protests, deploys dehumanizing rhetoric, and facilitates hate crimes and the weaponization of the law.”

The predatory world order discards racial and gender justice, mocks women’s rights, declares civil society a common enemy, and rejects international solidarity. It directs an unprecedented hike in military investments, enables unlawful arms transfers, and imposes sweeping cuts to the international aid budget, risking millions of avoidable deaths and decimating thousands of organizations working for human rights, sexual and reproductive rights, or press freedom.

Amnesty’s report highlights generally how states have undermined the international rules-based system, hindering the resolution of problems that affect the lives of millions, such as negative trends regarding armed conflicts, repression of dissent, discrimination, economic injustice, and the abrupt halt of humanitarian aid. Many of these trends represent setbacks that risk continuing in 2026 and beyond.